


you are the dreamer, we are the dream

by wentz



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe, Insomnia, M/M, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 11:50:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7639087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wentz/pseuds/wentz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mikey wakes up in one of three ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you are the dreamer, we are the dream

**Author's Note:**

> this is just a little stand-alone that i wrote as a warm up. i guess you could say it's set in like a college au or something, but mainly it's just not set in canon lmao.
> 
> i did all the beta stuff myself so if there's any mistakes they're entirely my own. i have a habit of using superfluous commas and semi-colons, zoinks.
> 
>  
> 
> [read it on livejournal](http://wentzway.livejournal.com/575.html)

Mikey wakes up in one of three ways.

  1. Opening his eyes as though he hadn’t fallen asleep at all, had just been in the middle of one of his trademark slow blinks. This way is the most common. Staying in bed after this sort of awakening only leads to the special sort of frustration that comes from trying and inevitably failing to chase sleep, a frustration Mikey knows intimately. When he wakes up this way, whether it’s six in the morning or some smaller, godless hour, he immediately gets out of bed and leaves his bedroom to wander the rest of the apartment like a character out of a knockoff Brontё novel until his alarm goes off at eight. 
  2. Bolt upright in bed with shreds of nightmares bleeding from his temples, lingering around his ears to whisper their horrors one last time before evaporating. He presses his knuckles into his eyes, chest heaving, head reeling. His therapist’s voice springs to the forefront of his mind reminding him about cognitive distortions and being gentle with himself, but just beneath it a malevolent undertow of self-directed derision runs swift and deadly, threatening to sweep him away. 
  3. Somewhere he doesn’t remember falling asleep: the couch with the light of the TV too bright for his sensitive eyes; lifting his head from his laptop keyboard to see roughly one million N’s filling the text box of an email draft; on his back in a grassy patch of his backyard under a sky full of whirling stars; curled up on a pile of t-shirts next to the warmth of the dryer. These times usually happen in the midst of a long string of turbulent nights, one of those weeks when Mikey couldn’t pin down a good night’s rest if it handed him a hammer and held the nail for him. At a certain point his body hits the wall and the next moment Mikey stops moving long enough it goes into what Gerard refers to as “emergency shutdown mode, all antibodies on deck” (Gerard sometimes pretends to be cool and then he says shit like “all antibodies on deck” and absolutely ruins it for himself). “Emergency shutdown mode” is code for Mikey conking the fuck out, sometimes literally in the middle of a blink. When some unknown sound or shift in the environment eventually yanks him out of the impromptu nap, he spends the first thirty seconds to a minute epically confused, and then another three to five minutes holding his face in his hands. The naps leave him disoriented and heavy-headed, a taste like gunmetal settled deep into the pockets at the back of his mouth behind his teeth. Sometimes when he first wakes up, lying on his back somewhere that isn’t his bed with no memory of falling asleep, head pounding, mouth gummy and shitty, the word _hangover_ flashes through his head in hazy red neon, quickly followed by guilt and resignation. His stream of consciousness becomes a puzzle out of a Highlights magazine: _fuck     wasted          black out     tequilavodkajack which one which one     drugs     call in sick     idiot     gerard     idiot     mom  gerard  mom     idiot idiot idiot. What do these words have in common, kids? **ʇɔᴉpp∀ :∀**_   It takes that thirty seconds to a minute of getting his bearings before he remembers that he’s been sober for almost a year, and the following three to five minutes to ride out the subsequent emotional crash. 



\---------

When Pete first moves in (he promises it’s a temporary arrangement, just until he lands on his feet; abandoning his polisci major in the fourth year in favor of becoming a spiritual nomad is considerably less financially lucrative than he anticipated) he worries about disturbing Mikey with his weird sleeping habits (or lack thereof), but when he’s tiptoeing around in the kitchen at 3am the first night looking for some kind of vegan _something_ to munch on, the light flicks on and Pete turns around guiltily to see Mikey leaning against the doorsill wearing the distinct variety of bedhead that signifies a restless sleeper. Pete’s seen it enough in the mirror to recognise it on someone else. They watch each other for a few seconds before Pete holds up the jar of Jif in his hand. “You know this stuff kills orangutans.”

Mikey’s eyelids stay at half mast in his token Bored™ expression (which Pete knows by now is just an incurable case of severe RBF), but he purses his lips a little and bobs his head a few times in a nod as he considers the offending peanut butter. “You can come with me next time I get groceries.” He jabs his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the living room. “I Love Lucy is on TV Land until six.”

“Cool. Want a spoon?” Pete grabs two from the silverware drawer and holds them up next to the Jif questioningly.

“Yeah. Hand me some cups from that cabinet, I’ll pour us some apple juice.”

 

He’s perhaps improperly delighted that he and Mikey seem to have the same sleeping schedule, which is to say, no schedule at all. They watch an inappropriate amount of reruns together from Pete’s bed (Mikey’s couch) and if sometimes Pete zones out while trying to calculate the exact angle of Mikey’s nose, his host graciously pretends not to notice.

Pete can trace the last time he kept normal sleeping habits for a more than a consecutive week back to his freshman year of high school; he’s no stranger to insomnia and he’s certainly no stranger to fucked up heads, so he picks up on the pattern that overarches the anti-pattern of Mikey’s relationship with sleep within the first month of couchsurfing at Casa del Way. Pete blames this intuitive familiarity, mainly, for how easily and unconsciously he slips into a routine to match.

Once Mikey is up, he stays up. The timing differs, but when Mikey wakes up he doesn’t bother trying to go back to sleep, or reading or surfing the net in bed, or even just laying there for a while indulging in self-pity. Pete gets it; sometimes a bed feels more like a battleground than a sanctuary, and not in the sexy way, either. In the World War III, bombs going off over your head, frayed nerves, boxed into a corner kind of way. Most of the time (every now and then Pete falls asleep around two or three and misses it - at some point his thankfulness upon waking mixes with a tinge of disappointment, which is stupid) Pete hears the click of Mikey’s door opening from the couch and preemptively goes to the kitchen to pour two cups of apple juice. Mikey shuffles into the kitchen moments later and doesn’t bother asking before pulling the box of kid’s cereal from the cabinet, going over to Pete’s makeshift bed, and making himself right at home. One night Pete glances over at him and thinks _home_ and immediately snorts at himself, because _duh_ , Mikey’s in his own goddamn apartment, of _course_ he’s at home. When Pete settles into his usual spot between Mikey and the arm of the couch, his brain whispers it again: _home_. He tells it to shut the fuck up.

 

The weird, poorly timed spells of narcolepsy throw Pete for a loop. The first time he finds Mikey mid cat nap, he slides back the shower curtain to start the water and barely catches his shout of surprise halfway between his nose and throat, transforming it into an aborted sound that Pete later types out as _snNRK_ in a text to Patrick. Mikey blinks up at from his spot in the bottom of the tub, bleary-eyed and catlike, both in the sexy way (the slow slide of his heavy eyelids) and the ridiculous way (the impossibly tight ball he’s curled his body into to fit in the narrow bathtub). Pete imagines running his hand down the C-curve of Mikey’s spine, counting each ligament as his fingers tick over them one by one, and then a mental image of Mikey as one of those flat-faced cats whose biology makes them look perpetually disgruntled and hilarious interrupts him and he laughs out loud, just once. It rings off the tile walls of the tub shower and Mikey blinks again, faster this time. “You’re naked,” he says conversationally.

Pete belatedly covers his junk with both hands (more for Mikey’s sake than his; it’s hard for him to get too worked up about people seeing his dick since those pictures leaked) and replies, “You’re napping in the bathtub fully clothed.” Mikey looks around, plainly still dazed, and nods vacantly, brow slightly furrowed, as though he’d just noticed. Pete laughs again, longer this time. Mikey’s gaze jerks up to him and slowly relaxes into a sheepish grin.

 

It takes longer for Pete to find out about the nightmares. He assumes that Mikey has nightmares, sure. Nightmares cause at least fifteen percent of Pete’s sleep problems and by all evidence the moving parts in he and Mikey’s heads run pretty much the same, or at least really fucking similar. He can’t ask, though, what Mikey’s nightmares consist of, because there’s a line that should be respected even at 4am on day four of no sleep and shockingly the idea of pressuring Mikey to reveal his deepest most personal Freudian horrors to him doesn’t particularly appeal to Pete all that much. In the end, he kind of finds out anyways. 

It’s around 5am - late for Mikey - when Pete hears the door click. Like a lovestruck version of Pavlov's dog, he automatically goes to get their apple juice. He’s shaking the bottle when he catches movement in the corner of his eye and turns to see Mikey standing in the doorway. Mikey has got one hand fisted in the loose fabric at the hip of his sweatpants, twisting and untwisting unconsciously, the other loose at his side. His glasses are missing, replaced by red lines heat pressed into his cheek by his pillow. Pete’s skin prickles at the expression on Mikey’s face. “What’s up?” he asks carefully. Mikey shrugs, but the line between his eyebrows denies the nonchalance. “You can tell me, man,” Pete assures. “I’m hard to weird out.” 

Mikey nods, fixing on Pete’s face. “Nightmare. You were…" he mumbles. One hand moves to push up his glasses but only bumps against the side of his nose. Mikey blinks at the offending fingers, then winds them tightly into the collar of his t-shirt, sighing. "You… I wanted to make sure.” His attention shifts away from Pete to a clump of fridge magnets (the poetry kind; Pete had rearranged them earlier to say "eat my ass beans. exquisite!"). Mikey’s adam’s apple bobs minutely, his mouth setting into a tighter line. He closes his eyes briefly and opens them in a snap, saying his next words in a rush. “Move in.”

It surprises an embarrassed half-chuckle from Pete. He cuts his gaze to the side, heat crawling up the back of his neck. “Um… you mean, like... long term? You don’t have to do that, man, I’ve already overstayed my welcome. I can’t sleep on your couch forever.”

“Then don’t sleep on the couch.” Mikey’s voice is quiet, low. He draws closer, gets up in Pete’s space. “Pete.” Their hands bump together. Pete is still holding the bottle of apple juice against his chest with the other one and he suddenly feels very, very stupid, like maybe he might be the stupidest, slowest person he’s ever met. “Move in.” Mikey’s fingers play with Pete’s lightly ( _like foreplay for holding hands_ , Pete thinks, and immediately hears a mocking _oh my god_ in his own head that sounds a lot like Patrick).

Pete looks up at Mikey, who’s giving him some seriously potent ‘come hither’ eyes, and proves just how stupid he really is (and wow, holy fuck, no wonder he couldn’t finish college) by saying, “Where will I sleep, then?” 

Mikey’s eyelids raise completely and his eyebrows arch towards his hairline, cartoonishly high. “Um.”

It clicks, and Pete is REALLY stupid, Pete is really, really, _excruciatingly_ stupid. “Fuck,” he croaks, and Mikey laughs, loud and long, throwing his arms around Pete’s neck to muffle it in the curve of his shoulder.

\---------

Mikey wakes up in one of four ways.

  1. Opening his eyes as though he hadn’t fallen asleep at all. If the other side of his bed is empty, he’ll go into the kitchen and get a snack from the cabinet while Pete pours apple juice, and then they’ll watch reruns until Mikey’s alarm goes off or one of them falls asleep, whichever comes first. On the occasion that the other side of his bed still has a Pete in it, Mikey finds that if he wakes the aforementioned Pete with a messy blowjob, he’s usually more than happy to provide a few ideas of how to tire Mikey out again. 
  2. Bolt upright in bed with shreds of nightmares bleeding from his temples, lingering around his ears to whisper their horrors one last time before evaporating. Sometimes Pete’s in them, sometimes he’s not. Regardless, Mikey finds his therapist’s voice is a lot stronger when his hand is pressed lightly over someone else’s pulse. Pete’s is steady and strong, and his hand comes up to cover Mikey’s without needing to ask. Mikey anchors himself in it as he fights the undertow. 
  3. Somewhere he doesn’t remember falling asleep: in Pete’s car, head tilted against the passenger side window; in the movies, once with his hand still in the popcorn bucket, much to Pete’s amusement (“You just looked so cuuuute.” “Kiss my ass, Wentz.”); at the table next to a full bowl of cereal, using the Fruit Brute box as a pillow; always, always, always with his head in Pete’s lap, Pete’s hands moving through Mikey’s hair so lightly, like he’s still a little afraid to touch. Mikey still wakes up confused, misplaced, but the bewilderment goes away faster and faster as Pete settles in and Mikey’s house begins to look more and more like a home. 
  4. Mikey wakes up the way a swimmer floats to the surface from the bottom of the deep end, borne up in a slow, unearthly slide, feeling the depth of unconsciousness lessen in his ears and head. He lays still for what could be minutes or seconds or maybe hours, dozing, unwilling to move and chase the last drowsy waves of sleep away. He’s not even really sure of when he first opens his eyes, just becomes aware of the soft, late-morning light coming in around the edges of the blinds, the gentle way the ceiling fan circulates the air as though the room is breathing. He watches the fan absently for a few moments, turns his head to the side to watch the way it stirs the hair sticking up on the back of Pete’s head instead. Mikey rolls onto his side, slips an arm around Pete’s waist, presses a kiss to his bare shoulder. He closes his eyes to listen to the deep, even tempo of Pete’s breathing, to feel the matching rise and fall of Pete’s back against Mikey’s chest; and without really meaning to, he drifts back to sleep. 




End file.
